A personal story of Holocaust never to be forgotten

Paul Grondahl

Updated 2:14 pm, Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Alex Silber, 94, of Albany, shares his story as a Holocaust survivor from Chelm, Poland, where all but a few dozen of the 15,000 Jews in the city were killed by the Nazis. (Paul Grondahl / Times Union)

Media: Times Union

Albany

Alex Silber is a 94-year-old Jew from Chelm, Poland.

In the decade before World War II, when Silber was a teenager, about half of Chelm's 30,000 residents were Jewish. They were leading citizens in the prosperous financial center and picturesque city on the banks of the Ochrza River in the eastern part of Poland.

Fewer than 100 of Chelm's 15,000 Jews survived the Holocaust. Most were loaded into train cars and sent by rail to the nearby concentration camp at Sobibor, where more than 250,000 Jews were exterminated among the 6 million who died in the Holocaust.

The German word for train station is bahnhof. The Jews had their own word for it: Todhof. Death station.

The train station where Silber's mother and four siblings were sent to their deaths is the place that helped save Silber, a horrible irony he cannot reconcile as a Holocaust survivor.

"I have cried plenty," he said on a recent morning at St. Peter's Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Albany, where he has lived for a few months after his health declined.

"It's hard to think about because it is so sad," he said in a thick, guttural accent. "But I have a story and I want people to know."

Silber spoke on the eve of Yom HaShoah on April 27, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is observed as a national memorial day and public holiday in Israel. Commemorative programs will be held through May 4 as part of the Days of Remembrance at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., established by Congress as the nation's annual commemoration of the Holocaust.

Silber's father put 18-year-old Alex on a train and he survived the Nazi terror by toiling in a Russian labor camp in Siberia during the war years.

The camp had its own form of deprivation, where death from starvation, disease and exhaustion was not uncommon. Silber's father, Iser, a sought-after tinsmith in Chelm, also survived the Holocaust along with a couple dozen other Jewish craftsmen who were kept in the city and used as forced laborers by the Nazis.

Silber has been sharing his story with Mara Jo Warford, 13, a seventh-grader at Bethlehem Middle School. She videotaped him and wrote an essay as part of a project in preparation for her bat mitzvah at Congregation Beth Emeth in Albany on May 24.

"His story is just incredible," Warford said. "He taught me not only about the Holocaust, but about being a good and caring person."

"I'm honored he shared his experiences with me. What he went through will never be forgotten," she said.

Silber recalled a happy life in Chelm before the war. He became an apprentice to his father at age 12 and learned the tinsmith trade. Alex was the oldest of Iser and Rachel Silber's five children. It all changed in September 1939, when Nazi troops occupied the city.

More than 1,000 Jews were murdered during the first deportation from Chelm on Dec. 1, 1939. The Nazis herded Jews into a crowded ghetto on the edge of the city beginning in the fall of 1940. Nazis later confiscated their property and burned many of their homes. A systematic roundup of inhabitants in the ghetto began in the spring of 1942, when trains full of Jews ran regularly to Sobibor.

That is where the story of Silber's mother and his four siblings — Figa, 3, Sarah, 6, David 9 and Chaya, 12 — ended. "We never found out what happened to them," he said.

After four years in the Russian labor camp, Silber was released. He made his way back to Chelm.

"Everything and everyone I knew was gone," he said.

Silber reunited with his father and they relocated to Vienna, where they worked as tinsmiths. Silber is a quick study who speaks Polish, German, Russian, Czech and English. In Austria, he wooed his future wife, Margaret, in part by making thick homemade chicken noodle vegetable soup for her. "She loved my soup," he said.

The Silbers were married for 64 years before his wife died last year at 81. They came to America in 1951 and raised a son and daughter in New Jersey, where he specialized in metal roofs and gutters. He taught himself English while he worked.

The couple moved to Albany a decade ago to be closer to their daughter.

"I've had a nice life in America," he said. He likes watching sports, and was a skilled skater and soccer player in Chelm.

His heart is heavy when he remembers his hometown, but his feet are happy. He tap dances while seated in a wheelchair.

Silber hopes to visit his father's grave in Israel one day, and he'll continue to tell his story.

"In this time of Holocaust remembrance, we need to share the stories of survivors, fight hatred in our midst and say never again," said Shelly Shapiro, director of the Holocaust Survivors and Friends Education Center in Albany, which hosted several student groups last week.

Today, as far as anyone knows, there are no Jews living among the 70,000 residents of Chelm, according to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.

But Alex Silber, a Jew from Chelm, survived the Holocaust. And he is here to tell about it.